Yeah, human research ethics didn't even really become a significant concern from what I can recall from college psychology classes until the Milgram experiments starting in 1963 and a book he published about it in 1974. You know, those experiments exploring obedience to authority where research subjects were ordered by an authority figure to harm someone with electric shocks and, at least in the original tests, never debriefed/told it was an actor and no one was hurt. The possible harm from that really got people started thinking about risks of human research and starting up ethics committees and things we have now to protect people. Plus, for the mentally ill up until pretty recently and even now it's still a struggle to overcome some pretty negative social stigmas that caused people not to be treated with a lot of respect.
Unintended pun, considering Ancel Keys studied oceanography and eels?